ABSTRACT
How you use your existing staff and organizational structure to support and drive safety improvement is an important consideration when building world-class safety. Safety is a distributed responsibility in that everyone working for a company has some responsibility for safety. It may be for his/her own safety or the safety of others or even the entire organization. To begin to understand the current state of a company’s safety program leadership structure and identify who is responsible for the varying parts of the program, a lean approach would be to identify all of the safety processes that comprise your safety program. Once that step is completed, those responsible can be aligned with each of the upper level safety processes. I would be willing to bet that you will identify some safety processes with unclear ownership. This usually is the case because safety is everyone’s responsibility and we work in functional departments. Simply ask the question, “Who is responsible for safety in the engineering (or name your favorite) department?” The most likely answer to this question is the motherhood and apple pie response: “everyone.” Safety is in every job description yet there are few job descriptions with safety in the job title. It is always farther down in the document near the catchall phrase: “and other duties as assigned.” Yes, we are all indeed responsible for safety, but what world-class safety requires are people who are passionate about safety. Locating and engaging people with passion for safety is an early requirement in building world-class safety.
